I've gone rounds on this with Kim Moody and the Labor Notes folks, prototypical "resist" labor radicals. Their basic story is that they don't want to dilute the class struggle by getting the unions involved in making management decisions and doing the things you have to do to make profits. Actually from my own pov, as someone who has worked at Solidarity House (UAW HQ in Detroit, albeit just in legal), I know no reason to think that union leadership, or even labor radicals are capable of running a car company in an intelligent way -- maybe they'd be no worse than the current management, although the union leadership is is particularly blinkered, indolent, and visionless --but they certainly would not be any better. The labor radicals oppose all joint union-management ventures like Saturn as cooptation of the union. They are smart people, but they are not business people and don't want to be. Fact of the matter is (and I guess I am skirting dangerously close to certain waters where I don't want to go), we need red business people, red accountants, red MBAs, red engineers and red factory and line managers. Maybe the movement would be much better off if more of our people went to Kellogg or Wharton than to graduate English departments or even, insofar as people still do this, "into industry." I don't mean these people have to be ideologically driven, but running a business in such a way as to make a decent product and, as the economists say, satisfy consumer demand, is actually a technical skill, one different from rabble rousing. And certainly different from the feather-bedding that is the main occupation of business unionism. Those guys can't even rabble rouse. So it is perhaps for the best that they didn't make a play for Chrysler. They would not have been able to contribute much that was positive.
--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Doug:
>
> I really don't know what I'd do were I in their
> shoes. I've never
> gotten a good answer out of labor radicals, who
> can't get more
> specific than "resist!"
>
>
> [WS:] Yeah, the radicals seem to be stuck in a rut.
> But if you want out of
> the box thinking - why did not the union buy the
> share of the damned thing?
> It was sold cheaply. Or bargain for stock options -
> which would give them
> at least some say about company policy - or at least
> more than making a
> ruckus in the streets.
>
> Wojtek
>
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